In Indian oral storytelling tradition, horror is king. The flesh-eating pishachas, shape-shifting rakshasas, blood-thirsty chudails and 'buri' aatmas are its heroes, both feared and glorified. But, the stories have either ended there, or been hidden in the vast tome of regional writing. Indian English literature has for long abandoned the "good ghost story"; the exceptions being the late Satyajit Ray and Ruskin Bond.

It was only last year, when literary festivals started inviting panels to discuss horror writing, that the tide seemed to be turning. "This was huge [for us], because horror was never considered literature in the first place," says Neil D'Silva, who has written over six horror books till date, but is only now securing plum contracts through literary agency, The Book Bakers. His recent work, Haunted, co-authored with paranormal investigator Jay Alani, was published by Penguin Random House, and sold nearly a thousand copies since November 2019. "Every publisher is looking for horror today. I think the spurt has come from movies and OTT platforms, where the genre has taken off. We had the Typewriter and Ghost Stories on Netflix. Bollywood's game-changer was Stree," says D'Silva. In 2019, A-list publishers Penguin, HarperCollins and Hachette joined the bandwagon, releasing both fiction and non-fiction horror titles. Many are still in the works.